Reflection - transformational momentThe moment that it all came together for me, I didn’t even realize what was happening. Paceñas were screaming, cheering, lighting off fireworks, and of course, jeering at their Chilean rivals. Bolivar had just beaten Universidad Católica 3-0, and the Bolivian crowd ebbed out of the stadium and into the street, rowdy yet unified in the night. Policía held the Chilean fans back in a corner to keep them safe. And somehow in that madness, surrounded by friends and strangers, a foreigner and yet a compatriot at the same time, I felt an odd sense of peace. For the first time, I truly felt in my core being that I belonged in the universe, that I was in exactly the place I was supposed to be, and though perhaps cliché, that I was part of something greater than myself. We wound our way back down to the city center, filling the entire width of the street, calling out to passersby with the news of our victory, laughing, singing, seeing only the beauty of that still, dark night. As my friends left me at the door to Martha’s apartment building on la Avenida Seis de Agosto, a fellow Bolivar fan greeted me, “Buenas!” and followed me into the elevator. During the ride up, as we transitioned out of fútbol mode and back into apartment-dwellers, I felt like I had found something I didn’t even know I’d been searching for. And I knew that the way I looked at the world from then on would never be quite the same.
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When I started at UW, I thought I was going to become a bioengineer and improve the world by making some revolutionary technological advance. So upon discovering the global health department in my first quarter, I decided to start attending their seminars and events to get a social context for what I should be engineering. I’d always had a passion for the political and social sciences, and I quickly got swept into international studies and geography courses to better understand global health. My academic experience at UW began to divide into two parallel paths – on one side the science courses I took as a pre-med student and eventual neurobiology major, and on the other, the courses I took as a global health minor to better understand the world. Each path was interesting and important to me, but as I got further into the coursework, I also began to see how they were interesting and important in the context of each other. As I learned about how much individual and societal health is dependent on socioeconomic inequalities, I became interested in doing a field study of this in one of South America’s poorest and most unequal countries – Bolivia.
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The global health internship in Bolivia changed my life. At a professional level, it helped me realize that I want to be a doctor rather than a bioengineer. At a more personal and yet oddly universal level, it changed the way I approach life. I come from a family obsessed with minimizing personal risks and upholding certain absolute standards for how life should be lived, and I have grown up in a society that values productivity, individualism, competition, and measurable achievement. Therefore, I was delighted to discover that life went on just fine in Bolivia, where it is customary to arrive a half hour late to everything, where you learn the bus routes and schedules by hopping on the next “minibus” headed in the right direction, and where people you are meeting for the first time will greet you with a kiss and welcome you into their kitchen for some coca tea. In fact, not only did life go on there, but the people seemed much happier. Bolivia has plenty of regional and class-based diversity, and these are, of course, generalizations, but this was the overall experience that I had. And what I gained from this experience was a sense of skepticism and questioning of everything I had previously been told about life. In Bolivia, I learned to question the values, the assumptions, and the way of thinking that I had grown up with. I learned how to encounter something new without judging it, how to overcome the idea that there is a hierarchical truth to how life should be lived, that there is a “best” or “right” way to do anything. I developed a true compassion for people who live and think differently than me, and in that process, I developed a true compassion for myself as well. This opening of my mind changed the way I have confronted both internal conflicts and external encounters with difference over the past two years, and it will continue to affect the way I address these challenges for the rest of my career and my life.
Feel free to explore this portfolio of my undergraduate experience at the University of Washington following the themed pathways below. |